Kurma Recipes

We had guests over Tuesday evening from India. I wanted to impress them with the Indian cooking skills I learned from Baji (my husband Lulu's late grandmother). I made one of my favorite Indian curry dishes called korma. It's a spicy curry in which goat meat is slowly stewed in coconut milk.

The key to the dish is the freshness of the meat. I buy my goat meat from a local Indian specialty market. Goat meat is popular in Indian cuisine so there are always fresh, tender cuts available.

Goat korma with okra is a spicy Indian curry dish. We usually serve it when my husband Lulu's family comes over for dinner as the rest of his family isn't vegetarian. To the Western palate, goat meat and okra wouldn't be an obvious choice of ingredients but they're very complementary.

To certain people, goat meat can have a strong taste, but I find that the meat at my local Indian market tastes wonderful and is very tender. Okra has a bad reputation as well due to its texture once boiled. I personally love this dish and could eat it by the pound, dipping rotis (Indian flat bread) in the spicy gravy sauce. At the very least, it’s a dish that will broaden your horizons.

In Urdu, shahi paneer korma would literally translate to braised paneer in "royal" curry. Shahi means royal but when it refers to paneer, it usually indicates a creamy, decadent tomato sauce.

To make the dish I started by quickly stir-frying cubes of paneer. Paneer is Indian-style soft cheese. I made the sauce with caramelized onion paste, yogurt, tomatoes, ginger garlic paste as well as several Indian spices. The paneer pieces are braised at a simmer in the curry sauce until well coated. The final touch is a little heavy cream. It’s not something you want to eat every day, but paneer korma is a perfect dish to make when you want to treat yourself.

Taro korma is an Indian vegetable curry. The spicy gravy contains fried onion paste and yogurt and is flavored with ginger-garlic paste as well as several Indian spices. Taro pieces are fried till crispy, and then finish cooking in the curry paste. Taro is a very starchy ingredient that makes the gravy a lot thicker and denser when added.

Kormas can be either vegetarian or "non-veg" with any assortment of vegetables, fried cheese such as paneer, or meat such as goat korma. I came up with this dish for a very simple reason: there was a basket full of taro waiting to be cooked! Taro root usually doesn’t keep for more than a week, and it will turn sour when it's mixed and stored in the freezer. Buy it close to when you’re ready to cook, and enjoy it. It’s definitely worth the effort.

Korma is a spicy curried dish of braised meat, made with fried onion paste. My favorite meat for korma is goat. Goat meat is not very popular in Western cuisine but it's quite common in South Asian dishes. It has a very similar taste to lamb but is much more tender. This is one of Lulu's grandma's recipes. She taught it to my mother-in-law, who passed the recipe on to me.

Contrary to murgh makhani curry (butter chicken), the meat doesn't require marinating time but tastes best when prepared the day before. Korma is also a lighter version of butter chicken since it contains no cream.

Korma is usually served with naan (Indian round fluffy bread made of white flour), basmati rice or some roti (flat Indian wheat bread).